Visiting Vet: Adventurous veterinarians

I was just flipping through a few veterinary publications looking for inspiration for this column. Yes, I still get the occasional printed professional journal, as hardcopy seems to be the only way I remember to read them. I often rely on recent cases to provide me with topics. I figure if I need to bone up on insulinomas, or the state-of-the-art allergy testing for cats, I might as well kill two birds with one stone. An unfortunate metaphor, but I can’t think of a better turn of phrase.

But this day I was stumped. I had already written about the interesting cases I’d seen lately. As I turned the pages, one after another, nothing excited me. Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip … Whoa! Full stop.

“Exploring the unique dental health of bears” by Shaun Thomson, MBA, BVSc. Seriously? I can’t even get my clients to brush their dogs’ teeth, and there’s a veterinarian out there doing dental care for bears? I knew there would be not a single sentence in that article that would be clinically useful to me, but I just had to read it.

The author is employed with Animals Asia at the Vietnam Bear Rescue Center, providing care to sickly and/or traumatized bears that had formerly been kept in captivity, often for years. It is painful to read about animals like these, caged, stressed, poorly fed, all to harvest bear bile to be used in traditional Asian medicine. These poor bears frequently have significant dental problems as a result of their previous circumstances, where they experienced inadequate nutrition and severe stress, often chewing on the bars of their cages. This kind of abuse is not confined to Eastern medicine. Too many of our products, pharmaceutical and cosmetic, involve the suffering of animals. But today is about a happier turn of events.

The bear discussed in Dr. Thomson’s article is named Rae. Rae, the rescue bear, had a bad canine tooth. I admire any veterinarian working with a bear, but especially a bear with a toothache! When I was in veterinary school long, long, ago, we didn’t get much training in dentistry, but we did do a few basic oral procedures. Extracting canine teeth was definitely one of the more difficult. Even in dogs, the roots of these fangs are very long. Canine tooth extractions can cause major trauma to the patient, sometimes leaving behind part of the root tip, or even resulting in accidental fracture of the jawbone. Dr. Thomson reports that in bears, canine tooth extraction can seriously compromise the integrity of the jaw. So instead of extracting Rae’s injured fang, he decided to do a root canal.

Dr. Thomson blithely shares such gems as “Examining a bear’s mouth is difficult,” and “Bear teeth are much larger than human, cat, and dog teeth, so the tools to complete dental procedures have not existed … until recently. “ This is the kind of thing that initially drew me to veterinary medicine. The multitude of species. The bizarre situations in which veterinarians find themselves, requiring creative, by-the-seat-of-the-pants solutions. That world still exists in wildlife and zoo medicine, and to some degree in farm medicine, but is largely gone from small animal practice in the U.S.

When I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, we were the veterinarians for the Philadelphia Zoo. There were a few particular cases I will always remember. The Galapagos tortoise who fell off his girlfriend and fractured his femur. How do you transport a 400-pound tortoise with a broken leg from the zoo to the third-floor surgery suite at UPenn? Upside down in a great, big wheelbarrow, of course. He may have had some sedation, but he seemed very relaxed, lying on his back in the barrow in the hallway as I waited with him to go into the OR. Then there was a large parrot named Watson, a macaw I think. Watson had lost most of his beak as a result of a fungal infection. The UPenn veterinarians created a prosthetic beak for him, and figured out how to attach it to the remnants of his natural bill. The material used was the color of Silly Putty, making Watson look like he was wearing Groucho Marx glasses with the big nose. They had to replace the synthetic beak periodically, but Watson was well-adjusted to the procedure, and always a welcome patient in the wards.

In farm animal practice, the patients are less exotic, but veterinarians are still often faced with the need for creative thinking. Simply figuring out how and where to move a cow, horse, sheep, or pig so we can work with them safely can be challenging. One summer during vet school, I worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in rural Virginia, doing traceback testing on cattle for diseases like brucellosis and tuberculosis. This might entail showing up at a distant farm in an isolated “holler” with nothing but a bunch of gates, ropes, and a portable chute, then figuring out how to rodeo a herd of uncooperative steers one by one into the headlock so we could take blood samples, all with an unhappy farmer standing by. If you think this isn’t dangerous, think again. Approximately 20 people are killed by cows annually in the U.S.

But to me, none of this compares with doing oral exams and dentistry on bears. The team at the Bear Rescue Center have already performed more than 100 root canals, and they have instituted monthly dental checks for the bears in their care. The animals have even learned to voluntarily open their mouths for inspection. I can’t even get many of my dog and cat patients to do that, so I greatly admire this team’s skill and perseverance. In my elder years, I am content with my tame practice, treating house pets, but it makes me happy to know there are still adventurous veterinarians out there … taking care of the bears.